Our house from space.....

Gday all,

I just stumbled across this cool aussie website that shows aerial view Sydney (and other capitcal cities in Australia). It is actually updated monthly - unlike google earth - so this picture was only taken around 4 weeks ago.



We thought it was about time we start thinking of landscaping. We have always had a fairly good idea of what we want to achieve. As the funds will be very limited - we will only be able to do the necessities to begin with - and then add other things over the years. To start off, we will have to have lots of retaining walls (rendered in "Dune" - the same colour as our roof). We are also going to have travertine pavers around the pool and alfresco area. The rest is more or less just grass. We will have a frameless glass fence in between the alfresco and pool area - with normal pool fencing alongside the top right grassed section. I am no artist - but here is my best rough sketch - which more or less shows all the above:



I also got an email from Wisdom today - they are planning on doing the excavation for our site starting this Friday....yay! At this point we are in two minds whether we want our slab before Christmas. Is some ways it would be a nice present - but then again - our next payment is due when the slab goes down. With the 4 week builders holiday - we could save a heap of interest if we can delay it....

Now that is one big hole!

How time does fly. I cannot believe it has been so long since the last post! So much has happened.....

The house was demolished without too much fuss. It only took 4 days from start to finish. Here is a picture taken after the block was cleared:



After the house was demolished we had to get some extra excavation done for the 'overburden'. Our block is on the high side of the street and consequently slopes towards the street. As our house is having a cut of about 1m at the rear, we had to get rid of around 400 tonnes of soil in order to get the pool down to the same level as the back of the house. Take a look at our big hole:



The pool builder started the pool around the beginning of November. The steel and formwork was completed last week and today they finally finished the concreting:



We signed off with Wisdom last Friday - and we should have a site start within the next 2-3 weeks. We were hoping to have a Slab by Christmas - but then again we have to pay over $120k once this is done - so in some ways we would rather this done after the builders 4 week holiday period.

More posts to come soon!

Ready to rumble!!!

Wow - has it been over 5 weeks since my last post?

Lots of good news - and a little bit of bad to report.

First with the good news. Our pool DA got approved on the 6th October - which was our final approval needed before we could commence. Our friends who were living in the house moved out about 3 weeks ago - and we then had a demolition sale! We managed to sell the kitchen, bathrooms, some windows and all the air cons. Some crazy dude even ended up buying the old screen doors and toilets. Yes, that is right the TOILETS! This all thankfully boosted our fast dwindling fund reserves!

Now with the bad news :(
The demolition company had a look under the brick work and found a whole heap of asbestos. Apparently it must have been an old asbestos house that someone had bricked over in the 70's. This of course led to a big decline in our fund reserves (yes, much more than what our demo sale boosted them by).


Moving on now. The demolition started last Friday. I have attached a couple of blurry iPhone pictures of the progress so far. The demolition should finish up on Thursday - with the bulk excavation done on Friday. Our pool team will be coming next week or the week after to do the actual pool excavation and concrete formwork. Hopefully after this Wisdom can start with the actual house...yippee!

Till next time....

DA Approved

We finally got our house DA approval on the 2nd September. Very exciting! We had to make a few slight changes to the plans in order to comply. First we have to install a privacy screen on the balcony - no big deal. Second we had to move the house back an extra 2.5m to bring it inline with the neighbours. Lucikly Wisdom had new plans drawn up in less than 10 days - and thus the reason the DA was approved so quickly.

Our current problems is that our Pool DA only went to council last week. We are planning on getting the demolition company to knock down the house as well as clear the trees where the pool is going to go - so we need to wait until that is approved before we can proceed with the demolition.

Our current tenants are moving out of the house at the end of the month - and we have then booked the demolition company for the 14th October (fingers crossed the pool DA is approved by then). This should also give us enough time for Wisdom to obtain the construction certificate.

We are hopeful that we will have at least a slab, frame and part of the brick work done before Christmas. At this stage we very much want to move in by the beginning of June next year.

I will post the 'new' plans on the blog this week. It is going to be a busy few weeks - as we have to make many of our final selections and sign off on everything before building can commence.

We cannot wait to start posting some progress pictures! There should be many - as we only live 5 or so minutes from the build..

Waiting for Council....

Not heaps to report with the build....

BUT - our little bundle of Joy arrived to the world on Ssaturday! Baby Matthew weighed in a 2.96kg and was 50cm long. We cannot wait for the new house to be built so we can all move in :)

Our Demolition DA was approved last week - so that is good news. Also our Neighbour Notifiction for the build DA ended on the 22nd - and we are now at the evaluation stage. Hopefully not long untill it is approved. We should be submitting our pool DA next week - and we need that to get approved quickly - as there are some trees that need to be removed for the pool - and we want them to be removed at the same time as the house demolition.

Fingers crossed for a September start! We would very much like to be in our new house by April/May 2010....well before bubs first birthday!

Colour and Council

On Saturday we drove all the way down to Wisdom Minto display home to select all our colours. We did not realise how far Minto is! It is down near Campbelltown!

We selected our Brick colour a long time ago. It is called 'Earth' which is part of Austral Symmetry range.



We are having off-white mortar - which we think will look nice with our chocolate colour bricks. Originally, we were going to have a light grey for the windows - but we have just changed these to white - which we hope will look good with the off-white mortar.

We have a colorbond roof. We wanted a fairly light colour which contrasted with the bricks - so we have chosen 'Evening Haze' which is kind like a soft latte colour. The garage door will also be Evening Haze. After handover, we plan on cement rendering the portico and piers and painting them the same colour.



For our interior colours, we have chosen to have all the doors, cornices, architraves & windowsills white. The actual walls will be 'Malamute' - which is a like a real light grey. It is quite a warm colour - I will see I can find a jpeg of it.

We haven't quite decided on our Kitchen yet - but we think it will be graphite type colour poly cupboards and a lighter grey caesarstone benchtop (40mm with waterfall edge). We are going to try and make a trip out to the Kitchen company to help decide.

We also found out last week that our land is classified as being bushfire prone (we are on the very outer edge of the zone). Hopefully this does not cause too many complications. We think we will have to have some aluminium mesh screens on the open-able windows.

Finally, Wisdom called today to say our application had been submitted to council. Hooray! I just checked online and there is no DA number yet....but I am sure it will not be too far away :)

House sold.....and building contract signed!

It has been very busy 4 weeks....I am not even sure where to start :)

We received our building contract on 25th May. A week later we ended up moving out of our Toongabbie house (very sad) - and we settled on 3rd June. Moving house is the pits - especially when moving from a house you owned and then into a rental! On top of all this we had baby classes - Linda is 36 weeeks now. The baby room at the new rental is almost setup - just a few little touches to go.

We signed the final building contract with Wisdom on the 16th June. We now have our colour appointment booked in for 27th June - and submission to council will be a couple of days after that!

Waiting for contracts

We received our updated drawings on Monday. Just had some minor adjustments. We extended the length of our Kitchen island bench by 500mm. Also added a cavity sliding door in between the main bedroom and WIR (towards ensuite). We moved some of the front windows to the left by 200mm to get a bit more symmetry. I will upload the new plans soon.

We expect to receive our contract later this week or early next week. We settle on our house in Toongabbie on 3rd June - and are hoping to have all the contracts signed before then so that we can submit to council soon after we settle.

Nothing else to report!

Drawings....

Ok, here are some of the prelim drawings on the floor plan and front/side elevations. Still some minor changes need to be done (adding a sliding door from master to WIR, changing the linen press doors sizing to 3x820 rather than 4x620 and few other minor things). I hope the pictures turn out :)

The Blog Begins

Gday all!!

This is my first attempt at creating a blog. I hope I am doing it right....

Anyway - DW and I are currently progressing with Wisdom to build our lovely new home at West Pennant Hills. We started off with the Manhattan 42 floor plan - but this soon expanded to be a Manhattan 51! I will upload some floor plans a.s.a.p.

We accepted our tender about 3 weeks ago. The preliminary architect drawings have been completed - and we will hopefully be signing and submitting to council in about 4 weeks (when we settle on our current house). Unfortunately, we had to sell our beloved home at Toongabbie to fund the build. Even more unfortunate is that fact that we have to rent for the next 12 months :(